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Working on a hardware startup, I'm seeing that hardware infrastructure is way behind software infrastructure. Figuring out to test a new iteration in a week feels like magic, when software companies can deploy iterations in an hour.

I think software infrastructure for hardware development is going to get better, but one of the biggest barriers is the small size of the open source hardware movement compared to open source software.

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Hardware tooling is bad. Like really lifesuckingly bad. Download yourself some free Xilinx IDE and try to do some Verilog Hello World on a cheap demo board. Blink a LED or something. Its so bad you will want to scream: Dog slow sythesis (~compilation), useless IDE support, ten steps to run something, badly composed. Errors will land in some arbitrarily named logfile somewhere between the code. More expensive tools are hardly any better.

I started doing hardware but ran away, I feel it is a waste of developer time to even consider doing any custom hardware designs. People should be punished for even thinking about using FPGAs. Just don't do it.

Sorry for the rant, but I feel warning yall is my duty ;)

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